


Burnt Norton

by Anonymous



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean
Genre: Adoption, Breakup, F/M, Historical, Kidfic, Parenthood, Post-Curse of the Black Pearl
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-09-17
Updated: 2008-09-17
Packaged: 2017-10-01 23:47:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened / Into the rose-garden."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burnt Norton

**Author's Note:**

> My deepest gratitude toward [Berne](http://www.ragnell.org/berne.html) and [Ceria](http://ceria_talesin.insanejournal.com/) for their extensive betawork and hand-holding.

> Footfalls echo in the memory  
> Down the passage which we did not take  
> Towards the door we never opened  
> Into the rose-garden.  
> ~ T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton  
> 

It was dawn before she got her nerve up. She watched Jack shake himself dry after his morning plunge over the rail, and her fingers tightened on the _Black Pearl'_s helm. The well-worn grooves were comfortable—but no matter how familiar, her hands had not worn them. Gibbs was dozing in an alcoholic haze by the fo'csle, and Jack leaned over and began to drip deliberately on him. "Jack," she blurted, staring fixedly at the scar-pink shreds of the eastern clouds over his shoulder.

"Mmm?"

"Nothing," she said, and Jack didn't even look up.

"Nothing," he said scornfully, "is nothing, love. Try again."

She glared at him, and he smiled beatifically. "I hate you," she said, and it wasn't true, but she wished it were. It would have been easier if it were. Even mere indifference would have simplified it all; but nothing that touched Jack Sparrow was ever simple.

He was watching her, his eyes dark, made darker by the lamp-black that never smudged. "It's a heavy thing, your nothing," he said, a moment later, turning away to gaze out over the flat expanse of salt to the west. "When I look at you, these last weeks, or speak, or reach, your nothings come."

"Jack," she said again, helplessly. Sunrise was over, and the world was ordinary again. She drew a shaky breath, and stepped away from the helm, leaving one hand resting on the spokes for the moment. "Captain Sparrow," she said, her throat dry; she had not called him that since—since they had waited, half-certain he was already dead—and the syllables felt strange as they passed her lips. "The _Pearl_ is yours."

He strode across the upper deck to stand at her side. His long fingers with their heavy rings rested against hers, and it was not the sun that had left her skin darker than his. "Yes," he said. "She is."

She wrenched her hand free of his grip. He didn't reach for her, and she stepped away from the warmth of his body, and swallowed hard.

"She isn't yours," he said, understanding dawning in his eyes, and as she squinted against the sunlight that flooded her face, she saw his mouth twist. "She'll never be yours," and he sounded almost angry.

If she could have hated him, she would have. "Don't you think I _know_ that?" she demanded. She lifted her chin, ignoring the beam of light that burned its way into her eyes and into her blood, drawing her skin taut as a sail. "Can you think I would _ever_—" and it was too much, as the sun dazzled her vision and the set of Jack's jaw made her palm ache with a phantom slap. She drew a single shuddering breath, and stepped further away.

"Anamaria—love—" Jack's hand was clenched into a fist, and he still held the helm steady.

"Not enough," she said, and perhaps he didn't know what, exactly, she was talking about, but perhaps he did. "Not _enough_. Jack."

He nodded.

"We're Trinidad-bound," she said. "Know a man there?"

"Aye," Jack said. "I do."

* * *

"Tell me what you want," Will had said, frustration spilling through his veins, as unpredictable and unbelievable as the force of waves against the shoreline. It was an unfamiliar and frightening sensation, all the more so because he knew he could not master it; if there had been a sword nearby, he would have snatched it up and held it to her throat, which, even a moment prior, he would never have believed of himself.

"I want—" she snarled, "I want to _go_!"

"Go where," he demanded.

"Somewhere _else_!" She sank into the wing chair and balled her fists. "Anywhere else," she said, sounding suddenly exhausted. "I just want to _go_."

"Elizabeth—" he said, reaching one hand through the shaft of sunlight that broke the air between them.

She looked up, and her eyes were wet, but she shook her head. "Will," she murmured, the word little more than a sob. He dropped his hand.

* * *

She hadn't said goodbye to Jack. It was only a little sloop, the _Lady Eve_, but it was enough.

She began smuggling as soon as she could, smuggled anything she could, took any risk—somehow Jack's luck seemed to have rubbed off on her—and soon she was sailing through the Caribbean with a hold full of contraband, and soon enough she had almost enough to do what she wanted.

Almost.

* * *

Jack wasn't surprised to see them.

* * *

It was their third day, when Will's calluses from the forge bellows had proven wholly inadequate to the demands of rope and salt, and when Elizabeth had given up entirely and hacked her hair off at the nape of her neck, that he realized he had not seen Anamaria at all.

"Jack?" he asked, watching him adjust their course minutely, watching the squint of his eyes as he held the compass steady in his unscarred palm.

"What?" Jack tossed his head like one of the horses Will used to shoe, flicking a braid out of his eye, and bit his lip. Will laced his fingers together, flat on his thigh, feeling the warmth soak through the thin, rough homespun.

"Where's Anamaria?"

Jack didn't answer, concentrating on his hands on the helm. His skin was almost the same color as the battered, polished wood, Will noticed, and wondered idly if the stories Elizabeth had told him, of the haunted ship whose crewmen became part of her timbers, were true. But that would not be such a terrible fate, not for Jack, who would likely see it as the final expression of his communion with his ship; he could even see Elizabeth, one day, pressing her cheek to a spar and thinking _mine_ with all the unhesitancy she seemed unable to yield to Will.

"Jack," he repeated.

Jack laughed, snapped the compass shut. He looked at Will for the first time since Will had joined him at the helm. The heat of his gaze was stronger than the sunshine that gilded the wet line of his mouth. "You miss her?" he asked, his tone unexpectedly gentle.

Will's breath caught at the shocking tenderness of Jack's voice, which had abruptly taken root in his chest. "Where is she?" he said again, only realizing after speaking that he'd implicitly promised to answer Jack's question when Jack did his.

But he didn't. He stomped down the stairs to the main deck, tucking his compass inside his coat, and Will watched his back duck around the edge of the foresail, feeling curiously bereft. He wouldn't have known how to answer Jack, anyway; it was for the best, really.

* * *

They sailed north, and south, and east, and west. They made port, and emptied the hold, and filled it again with stacked barrels of grog and salt pork and hardtack, and sailed out again with the next tide, the next fresh breeze. Every time they made port, Will fell in love with it—Ste-Genevieve-des-Fleurs had the best pastry he'd ever tasted, there was a house off the High Street in Amara that was for sale with a bay window Will coveted instantly, there was Devvetobbo, with a swordsmith whose work made Will catch his breath in awe.

But Elizabeth laughed like the wind, and her mouth tasted of curry spices and salt. He tried to hold her, but she slipped through his fingers like water.

Will grew quieter and quieter as she blossomed away from land.

It was hard for him to sleep, always braced against the heave of the sea, but it was just as hard for him to wake, exhausted as he was by the effort of movement on a foreign element. He dreamt of sand, wagon-ruts in dirt roads, the weight of a watering can in his hands.

* * *

_Almost_ seemed to be her fate; there was a small storm — small enough to be survivable alone, large enough to set her back almost seven Portuguese silver coins for the ruined stores, fifteen French _louis_ for repairs to the smashed aft-mast and the scars left on the _Eve_ — and then the price of tea dropped like her heart, when the American embargo was lifted, and she was left scrambling. There were always new harbor duties, and she was through paying for anything with the coin of her breasts and thighs; if she docked in the coves and dragged the _Lady Eve_ up onto the beach, she had to find a way to bring her cargo into the towns, and she lost the trade in Charlestown when she was held in jail overnight as an escaped slave.

That was one time that she was grateful for Jack's tutelage; it was the work of half-an-hour to break out of the jail, and she even made off with the guard's pistol and half a dozen shells, but she lost her cargo, and knew she would never again set foot there.

It grew chilly, too, now that she did not sleep among a dozen warm bodies belowdecks, and her skin grew used to the scratchiness of the wool blankets she wrapped around herself when she steered through the night, her eyes straining to hold the North Star through the cloud cover.

She did not miss the _Black Pearl_. She had no energy or time to spare for regret, and besides, the _Eve_ and she had learned each other, had told each other their stories. Sometimes it was horrible, only having a boat to love, but it was her boat, and so even the loneliness was bearable, if no more.

* * *

Will did not count the time in vermilion sunsets or hurricanes or even gold coin through his fingers, but the number of occasions that he did not have to coax Elizabeth from the wind and the _Black Pearl_'s prow cleaving the ocean. When she did come to him, her delight in his mouth and his touch was unfettered and unfeigned, and she gave of herself freely, but the worst of it was that Jack did not taunt him with how much more easily he could capture Elizabeth's interest.

Eventually, one night, when Elizabeth had hurried back to the _Pearl_ with eager footsteps, turning away from his latest attempt to anchor her again, he pushed her up against the wall of the tiny, dark cabin they shared on the _Pearl_ and fucked her senseless. They'd long since accepted that nearly every particular of their moments intimate would be public property, but Will still treasured that no matter what anyone heard, they'd never see the flush climb up Elizabeth's breasts, never watch the storm rise in her eyes, never lick the invisible salt from her throat and wrists. Their second week on board, he had taken time away from sleep, and cursed himself for it the next day, to caulk up every knothole in the door to what Jack had insisted on calling the Lover's Bower.

She was gasping for breath, sleepy, sated, happy, when he whispered, "You'll never choose a place, will you?" the last of his hope thready in his voice, and she blinked, dazed.

"No," she said, and Will pulled away, did up his trousers, and stalked up on the deck. Jack jerked his head to Gibbs, who took the helm, and went to lean against the railing near—but not too near—where Will was standing, his body taut with grief.

"Doesn't mean she doesn't love you," he said, looking at the wine-dark water below rather than Will's face.

Will's breathing was ragged in the falling darkness before he spoke, and the wind snatched greedily at his words. "She loves you more," Will said. "She needs you. She doesn't—she—"

* * *

It wasn't until the sunrise broke over the horizon, dazzling her gaze, that Elizabeth broke down and wept, silently, her hands cradling empty space next to her belly and breasts.

She was dry-eyed when she went on deck. It was perhaps fortunate that the sea was as empty as the cloudless sky, for the light, glancing off the tips of the swells and forming a silver and gold collar along the horizon, seemed to be particularly fierce that morning; if she had been in her childhood home, she would have begged a headache and gone to bed.

But her bed had become a hammock and held no promise of anything but solitude, and she was no longer a child. She did not know what she was—a woman or a pirate or some half-way thing, a mermaid who could not survive on dry land nor live forever in the sea—but a child she was not.

She had never wanted children, never begged Will to play at marriage or at keeping house; her games had always been of war—the Knights of the Round Table, the Crusades—and roaming. Now that she had felt the kick of a gun against her shoulder and washed another man's blood off her boots, she was not innocent of the muck and squalor and nausea that came with the glorious victories; it was not merely a game any more.

It had never been merely a game to Elizabeth.

* * *

Will slept—or didn't sleep—on the deck for the next six days, and Elizabeth emptied Jack's marzipan cache and ate it all.

Lines tightened the skin around Jack's mouth, and he paced the foredeck, watched the empty water they were to approach, muttered in an undertone to the _Pearl_. Brazil had already fallen over the rim of the world when Will thought to ask, "What next?"

Jack shrugged and settled onto a coil of rope, his knees drawn up to his chest. "You could jump overboard," he offered, and Will's chuckle was humorless. "You could push her overboard."

"No," Will said. "I couldn't. I love her." He turned his face into the breeze and felt the cool lines of moisture on his face sharp as a knife; but they would leave no scar.

"Ain't that the truth," Jack murmured, and Will nodded. "Be easier if you didn't." He nodded again. "But you do." Jack was not fool enough to question that; Will was grateful for it. "'S'all right," he said. "You're a fool, but you come by it honest, Will Turner. I can't like it, but I can't blame you for it."

Will glanced at him. Jack shrugged, his eyes distant on the horizon. "Thank you," Will muttered.

"Save it," Jack snapped. "I'm not bein' kind."

"Aren't you?" Will asked, not sure if he was truly surprised.

* * *

Cotton's parrot settled on her shoulder; she held out a piece of the hardtack on her palm. "Share an' share alike, isn't that it?" she asked.

Jack's fingers snapped the crust off her palm. "Get your finger taken off," he said, flopping down beside her, and the bird settled on his hat. "'Sides, I don't hold with havin' creatures on board. Women I can abide, specially if they're pretty, but creatures!" He shuddered elaborately.

She took another bite of her cracker. It was hard to chew, and she mumbled through her mouthful, "Someone told me a story that you're a selkie, Jack."

"Filthy lies," he said, "but it does me heart good to hear 'em. Who's been telling that old tale? Ah, don't tell me, let me guess."

She leaned back on her elbows and watched him cock his head. Gibbs had been a fool to say Jack was a selkie, or even a selkie's child — he loved the sea, that she could not doubt, and he was far more than his name (not, perhaps, as great as his legend, but she could not fault him for that), but still and all, when she closed her eyes, Jack's voice slipped over her sun-flushed skin like cool, colorful feathers.

She smiled, thinking of Jack's long hands trailing over his ship, the bands of cool metal and the chunky pieces of gemstones glittering as he beat out a staccato rhythm with the very tips of his fingers, almost as if they were wingtips, as if Jack were merely waiting for the opportune moment to throw his head back and fling himself into the air like his namesake.

"Once," Jack said, and she startled, "I saw a black swan, you know. I've seen swans many and many a time, seen 'em young and callow and ugly as sin, and there's a river I crossed once that's owned by a King who claims all the swans in all the world, on account of some prophecy, and he has a flock paddling around, seems they're lucky an' as long as they're still on the river, his kingdom shall prosper — relieved him of the, ahem, _burden_ of quite a number of pretty pieces, as I recall — and they were lovely, white as coconut. But I've only ever seen white and black."

She waited for him to finish the story, but he was staring off with a dreamy expression on his face. "Oh?" she said eventually, wishing desperately that she had paid better attention to Mademoiselle Bovary's lessons on holding proper conversation.

"You know you're already a story?" he asked, and didn't wait for her answer. "Stickley got free drinks in Rioja because he's on the same ship as you. The Golden Swan, that's what they're calling you. I'll have to look for some jewelry for you to wear. Reputation's no good if you don't do somethin' with it."

She had known, but tried not to think about it. She was used to gossips, used to her reputation preceding her (as brittle as it is beautiful, she had read once in her father's moralizing tracts). She shoved her hands into the slashed pockets of her breeches and looked away.

"You'll be Good Queen Bess, the Pirate Queen, in a few years," he said, "if'n you stick with me."

It wasn't a tease, and it wasn't a promise—quite—it was a laughable thought; no one had _ever_ called her Bess, of all the unfashionable names imaginable, and she said, "My place is with you." It was no less true on the deck of the _Black Pearl_ than it had been in Port Royal Fort, months before, and the syllables felt right in her mouth, rounded and sharp in all the right places.

"Good," Jack grunted, and his bootheels thudded on the wood as he settled further into his slouch. "Rather have a queen than a golden swan."

"An' why's that?" she asked, curiously unsurprised at how her speech seemed to fit easily into his.

"You're neither one thing nor the other, Lizzy," he said quietly. She swallowed. "Golden swan isn't bloody natural, all right? I have had _enough_—" and she cut him off by laying a hand on his arm. She never would have dared to do that before (although she shied away from defining 'before' precisely), when the prohibition against touching a man still lay like fine silk over her skin.

"I know," she said.

"S'pose you do," he said. "It's not entirely fair of me, I s'pose." She waited for him to explain, and after he chewed on the knuckle of his thumb for a moment, he said, "Gibbs says my mother was a selkie, an' I captain a ship been damned twice over and I love her, and I'm a pirate who don't touch women when they don't wish it."

"Peas in a pod," she whispered, echoing what he'd told her even before she'd claimed her place by his side.

"Aye. You an' me."

The parrot squawked wordlessly.

* * *

They found Anamaria at sunset. "Hear you've done well enough for yourself," Jack drawled when he boarded her little sloop.

"For myself, aye," she said.

He cocked a brow. She stared at him.

Will's mouth was pressed flat with misery, but he managed to smile, and kiss Anamaria's cheek, and they ended up stretched out on the deck of the _Lady Eve_, half-drunk, the bottle between them as an empty reminder of the necessary space.

They were watching the stars wheel overhead, when Will began to talk muzzily about how he wanted to go somewhere and stay there, have a forge, smell the dirt and the crushed plants under his shoes, clean soil out from under his fingernails and know how the light fell on the ceiling over his bed at dawn in December. He wanted _somewhere_ to turn into _here_.

He didn't say, was not drunk enough to admit, that Elizabeth would never be satisfied with that.

Anamaria was silent, and she rolled over to her side to see that Jack and Elizabeth were busy with their own bottle and their filthy shanties, and then she curled up against Will's side, a warm female knot of muscle and bone and sweat. "Another year, maybe two," she said dreamily, "and I'll have enough to buy my son."

"Your what?"

"My son. Beautiful little boy, he was, an' he knew me, always knew me, hope he hasn't forgot me. It was the overseer's brother who had him, birthday present, took him away from me, and he carries the moneybags and the papers and smiles pretty and he's _my boy_."

"Who has him?"

"Whitey," she said, and fell asleep, her face tucked against Will's shoulder. He lay there, abruptly sober, and felt the warm damp of her breath seep into the cloth of his shirt, and the stars spun overhead, cold, distant, and uncaring. They were beautiful to watch, and he did.

In the morning, she had a splitting headache and didn't object when Will dabbed water on her temples. "Your son," he said, crouching by her side, shading her face from the worst of the glaring sun.

She spat profanity at him in gutter dialects, mumbling eventually, "Oh, god, go away, let me die in peace, what the hell was that shite?"

"No, Anamaria. This is important. Who owns your son?" The tension in Will's frame, the crease in his brow, was different from the night before, she realized through the red throb stabbing her temple and the taste of fish scales in her mouth. She squinted at him and rested her hand on his sleeve.

"Name's, ah, Flanigan."

Will nodded. "Thought so." That was excitement, she realized, in his eyes and the way his fingers covered hers. "I know where he is."

She sat up so fast the sky threatened to crack her skull open. "What? You not joking with me, Turner."

"No," he said. "I know where he is. And I can help you buy him."

* * *

Jack wouldn't let him take anything off the _Pearl_ that he hadn't brought on with him; Elizabeth hid in the crow's nest and Will would have considered climbing up there to say goodbye if it hadn't been for the sooty weight of Jack's gaze on his skin.

* * *

Will was not a good sailor. He knew this, admitted it, was almost proud of it—his father's pirate blood had not come through cleanly, and he was an awkward, fumbling, split-second-too-slow sailor.

It developed, though, that he was a damn good smuggler.

Anamaria was glad to turn the accounts over to him, and gladder still to relinquish much of the price-negotiations to his care; she had never been interested in bargaining. But Will made her profit margin swell as her belly had, years before, and she watched in amazement as the cache of coins in the wall of her cabin glimmered in the lantern-light. There were more coins there, every time she checked.

She did not stint in her praises, and her glee infected him like pox, so that they often found themselves laughing as they steered through the swells. It was, Will thought, like having a pot full of dark, damp soil, waiting breathlessly for something golden-green to emerge, unsure of what, exactly, it would look like, but certain it would be beautiful.

He did not think beyond the flower itself. Anamaria did. "What's in for you?" she asked him through a mouthful of dubious chicken leg. He looked surprised.

"I—you'll be happy," he said, his brow drawn taut. "And I'll have helped."

She was not satisfied and took a long swig of grog, rinsing it through her teeth. "Not enough," she said, but Will nodded.

"Enough," he insisted, and she gave up and didn't press.

Will answered her a few weeks later, when she came up from a nap to take the helm. "I'll make you a deal," he said, and she stared at him.

"I don't make deals," she snarled, and her hands trembled when she put them against the rough-grained wood. Her chest hurt.

Will hadn't moved. "A request, then," he said, and there was something harsh about his voice. She was glad of it, glad that his throat seemed to thicken, hoped that he felt as sick as she did when she asked what he meant. "When you get Robert," he said, "I don't want to stay."

"Why not?" she demanded, surprised at how acute the sense of abandonment was. "You're a born smuggler, damn it, Will."

He shook his head. "I don't mean right away," he said hurriedly. "I'll stay for as long as you need me. But _Eve_'s getting older, Anamaria, every day. The caulking won't hold forever."

"Nor will I," she said tartly.

Will groaned. "I'm doing this all wrong," he muttered.

"So don't do it," she told him. "Stay. I'm not throwin' you off my boat."

"Ship," Will said under his breath, and smiled at her, that sweet smile of his that should have been cuffed out of him by the age of ten, but he'd grown up soft and still was in some places.

She smiled back. She always did. "She's a boat, Will. I love her, but she's a boat." It was true, and Anamaria was not a delusional fool, and not a liar.

Will didn't bother bickering over it with her, mostly because she was right. "Well," he said, "Robert's in Port Royal."

She rolled her eyes, the white-hot rage she had felt when he first told her that long since reduced to a wistful frustration at how close she had been without knowing it. "I _know_," she said.

"I have savings still there," he said. "I, er, forgot about them when—Elizabeth and I left," and she'd have wagered a chest of tea that there was one hell of a story behind that momentary stutter. "When we go fetch Robert—" as if it would simply be a matter of strolling up to Flanigan's doorstep and asking for her son by name, "I'll pick up the sterling I left there."

"An' then?" she asked.

"And then." He drew in a breath. "And then, you'll take us to—you remember when we were in Newfain?"

She nodded. It had been months before, but it stood out in her memory for Will's distraction afterwards, the smudged quality his eyes had carried with them for days later. She had been startled to find how intense her concern was for him.

"Oh," she said when he explained.

"Just think about it," he said, and crossed his arms behind his head and fell asleep.

* * *

When the _Black Pearl_ was caught in a dogfight between two Spanish privateers, Elizabeth killed two of the men on the _Santiago_, and ended up with a knife jammed between two of her ribs. She took fever, and Jack fretted over her for almost two weeks.

She called for Will at first, but when Jack brushed her forehead with his knuckles and whispered, "Ain't here, love," she opened her eyes, looking bewildered. "He couldn't—"

Memory filled her eyes before she fell into a restless doze. She flinched away from the moonlight that tilted in through the porthole, and Jack tacked a length of burlap over it. She watched him through slitted eyes, and smiled when he turned into the now-dim, close room. "Jack," she whispered, and he laid his lean, rangy body against hers, sighing, and although she was already too hot, she wrapped her arms around his shoulders, feeling the leather blouson he wore scratch at the tender skin on the inside of her arms.

She slept.

* * *

Arden haggled over the opium, but was glad enough to get the saltpeter without the import duties to pay full price. Will tucked the coins into his sash—half of the agreed-upon final price, the other portion to be given upon delivery of the cargo—and brushed his hair out of his eyes. "And Mrs Arden?" he asked, nodding his thanks when Arden handed him a mug.

He still preferred small ale, but it wasn't worth the offense to refuse a merchant. He sipped gingerly as Arden visibly puffed with pride, his grey hair seeming to expand like Chinese fireworks around his head. "Brought to bed of a son, three months past," he said, and Will raised his mug in congratulations.

"Nothing better to hear, another generation of honest men to trade with," he said, and Arden grinned. Gossip was the chief stock in trade of the small towns he and Anamaria preferred to deal with—it might be easier to pass unnoticed in the cities, but the competition was higher, and the government tended to ignore small country merchants.

He slumped against the chair, letting Arden's baritone wash over him.

"I'd hope so, I surely would. Been thinking of expanding the shop, in fact, now that I can be assured there'll be more to it than just me. Might head over to Port Royal for their auction next month, pick up a boy to help around the house and the heavy lifting--"

"Auction?" Will repeated.

Arden shrugged. "Third Tuesday, I recall."

Will didn't remember leaving the shop, nor walking through the town, but he remembered clambering over the rail of the _Eve_. "We need to go to Port Royal," he blurted, even before Anamaria looked up.

"Y'got such a good price?"

"There's an auction," he said shortly, crouching down to pull out the maps from where they were kept. "You chart the course, I'll bring the saltpeter and opium into Arden, tide's just late enough that if I hurry, I can get it all in before dark and back before we have to set off."

Anamaria stared at him. "I don't—" she said, eventually, when Will stood and turned to go belowdecks without explaining further.

He glanced up. "Robert's, what, nine, ten?" She shrugged, unwilling to commit to a number she was so unsure of. "Old enough for field work," Will said, his voice grim. "Old enough that it makes sense, that he'd be expensive enough to keep that—"

"_Oh_," she breathed, and he nodded.

* * *

The clouds lay across the horizon like grey stone bridges, broken once into saffron where the setting sun lit the sky, and Will's skin was gilded as he tied the _Eve_ up at the dock in Port Royal. "It'll be all right, Anamaria," he said, not even bothering to turn his head. It wasn't surprising that he could sense her tension; she had been pacing as they sailed in, straight into the light coming over the town.

"Easy for you to say," she muttered darkly, crouching to check his knots. Now that they were here, something felt amiss in her chest, as if her heart had been set adrift. She didn't like it, but she was not going to turn tail, not now, not even if this was frightening her more than a heavy broadside.

Will tugged on his jacket; his shirt was worn threadbare at the shoulder and cuffs, and he rubbed his thumb over his lower lip. "I thought you wanted this," he said, sounding confused and betrayed.

"I do!" she blurted, sitting back on her heels. "I do, I just—it's been so _long_, Will. What if—"

He sighed, and laid a hand on her shoulder. She didn't startle at the touch; she had shied away from him at first, but Will seemed unable to give up reaching out for her, bumping her shoulder with his as they scrambled around each other on the deck ladder, resting his hands over hers as she tied knots, leaning his head on her thigh as they stitched sail. "Anamaria," he said.

"All right," she snapped. "All right, I'm a fool, I know, Will. Just—_go_, all right?"

He didn't move for a long moment, and she could feel the weight of his unspoken words in the dusky air. "All right," he said, at last, echoing her. He squeezed her shoulder once and she heard his footsteps behind her as he turned to pick up his rucksack.

He was lightly disguised, his wispy beard and mustache concealing the fine line of his mouth, a hat tilted low over his eyes, and more than that, he moved differently than he had even when he joined her. She watched him walk away over the dock, the roll of his hips as he dodged a cart, the set of his shoulders braced against the weight of the coin. He had not been certain that no one would recognize him, but hadn't fretted over it; she had been expecting to have to reassure him. "I don't have to explain what happened," he'd said when she brought it up. "I know what happened, and the coin's good whether or no I've gossip to share."

He turned a corner and she sat down hard on a cask, feeling rather like a puppet whose strings had been abruptly cut. The _Eve_'s hold was empty of contraband, and their coin was good, and Robert was here, and there was no reason for her knees to feel as soft as sand at low tide.

Dusk fell slowly, blue and rose deepening, and she stared unseeing at the dock and the people hurrying over it. It wasn't until the first stars began to gleam palely that he came; but it wasn't Will.

"It's a shilling," he said, "to tie up at the docks. And I shall need to know your name."

She looked up slowly, startled but unsurprised; her daze had lasted far longer than she'd realized, and the first sharp prick of worry sharpened her tongue. "Not doin' you any harm, am I?" she demanded.

He huffed indignantly, and would likely have reached out to grab her (and she would have smacked his hand away, and there would have been a brawl within seconds), if her eyes had not fallen on who stood next to him. It was lucky that she gasped, that her breath stood still in her throat, that her thoughts stuttered to a halt in her mind; if she had been able to speak, she would have betrayed herself, would have spoken.

Robert's eyes were huge, just as she remembered them, but his mouth had lost its softness, its curves, and he wasn't even looking at her. He was staring over her shoulder, the hibiscus line of the horizon calling him as surely as it had ever called to her. She reached one hand toward him, but the dockmaster stepped between them. "Shilling?" he repeated. "And your name, _if_ you please."

She shook herself and tried on a smile, crisp and thin as taffeta. "Of course," she said, thinking frantically as she turned, her gaze skimming over the thin crowd of men on the streets visible from the dock. Will's hat wasn't there, and he had taken all their ready money, there was not so much as a farthing aboard, and she could not think what to do; her mind was caught, like a fish on the line, by Robert's presence, the creases in his trousers, and the faint bruise on his wrist.

* * *

Robert refused to speak to Will, who looked unaccountably hurt. He cuddled close to her, with all the evidence of attachment, and she wrapped her arms around his narrow shoulders every chance she got.

They had promised to ship a hundred barrels of beer for a man in Kingston Bay, so went there first. She didn't want to, but Will glared at her, and she gave in with bad grace. "It won't always be perfect," he snapped as he brushed past her, and she wasn't sure if she should believe him. What did he know of family?

But when they gave Robert the task of checking that the level of liquid in the barrels was fair, he refused. She slapped him, and then nearly cried at the look on his face, before fleeing to her bunk. She had been curled up there for only a few seconds before Will hauled her upright.

She knew he was strong, muscles wrought by the forge in Port Royal and fashioned further by the wind and ropes of the waves. She had seen him heave a sack of grain onto the carts at the docks as easily as most men lifted a tankard, but it was still shocking, how casually he could make her meet his gaze. "You're his mother," he said, and his fingers tightened momentarily. "Act like it, damn it."

Humiliation washed over her. No one had — she hadn't thought of herself as Robert's _mother_ in so long, no one had ever in her memory called her his mother, that it was as if a numb limb had suddenly flooded with sensation.

* * *

Africa was a heat-fever dream, Elizabeth thought, a continent of colorful baubles and strange food, stranger drink that tasted like tears and violets and lobster-shells. She watched everything with wide eyes, and when Jack tugged her beneath one of the carts that caromed about the narrow, crimson dust-coated streets, she went in a daze. "You've got to cut your hair again," he said, urgently, and she found her gaze fastened to him as it hadn't been in months.

It had been a shock, the first time she realized that Jack Sparrow was no longer strange to her. But now she could barely remember ever watching him with amazement and amusement. Now, Jack was only Jack, the same bastard who stole her rum at the tavern and who gave her unexpected presents, whose kisses were sometimes almost chaste, and whose voice would whisper filthy promises in the midst of storms (although she was never sure if those were truly directed toward herself or the _Black Pearl). He was strange, still, odd and weird and bewildering, but she knew his strangeness intimately now.  
_

"Why?" she asked. She knew the way she dug her fingers into the short tail and lifted her chin, exposing the tanned skin of her throat, with a faint bruise from last week at the base, would say more than her voice ever could.

Jack swallowed, and looked away. "There's cause, believe you me," he said. "D'you need an order?"

She shrugged. "Tell me why," she repeated, and she could hear (hoped Jack couldn't) the six-year-old who had insisted that she was old enough to know _everything_ about how Mamma died.

"If you don't," Jack snapped, turning back to her, radiating stripes of light and shadow falling across his face from the wagon-wheels, "You'll be thrown into prison as a whore, love, and I find I'm loath to rid meself of you that way. S'a damn good thing you don't trouble with skirts no longer, or you'd be there already." And now she couldn't drag her eyes away from his face, the terrible, coppery planes of it, and she opened her mouth to say — nothing.

Nodding mutely, she fumbled at her legs for the knife tucked into her boot. It was a wicked-looking thing with a sinuous blade that gleamed bluely in sunlight, and a plain handle. Jack had given it to her, saying, "Should fit your hand, love. Picked it up in the Philippines, last time but one." Whenever Jack said 'picked it up,' she'd learned he meant 'pickpocketed,' but she didn't mind. She held it out toward Jack, hilt first. "Do it," she said, dropping her head forward so he could hold her chin steady. When he sawed through the knotted strands, she felt a breeze flutter over her spine and wasn't sure if it was Jack's dry lips, touching her exposed skin with a tenderness he rarely displayed.

* * *

Newfain was unusual, in that the blacksmith's wasn't crammed in amongst the dressmaker's shops and laundresses and taverns and fishmongers of the town marketplace. Will wasn't sure why, but the forge stood between the village green and a curving swathe of trees that stretched out beyond the houses. There was a gap between the back wall of the house and the place where the forest's brush began, and Will crouched, digging his fingers into the loose loam of the soil. If they widened the distance between the house and the trees, it would make a tolerable garden.

He turned, to see Anamaria leaning against the doorframe, her arms folded, watching him. "This is what you want," she said, not quite a question. He nodded. "'S'awfully small," she said, turning her hips a little to cant her body toward the cool, dim interior of the kitchen, which smelled of dust and old grease.

He shrugged and stood up, not crossing to join her. "_Eve_'s smaller," he pointed out. Small crumbs of soil fell from his hands when he brushed his fingers together, feeling the rasp of his hard-won calluses and the powdery feeling of the earth.

"_Eve_'s a boat, Will. Everything's small at sea, th'ocean takes up all the space a man might claim." She tilted her head, listening to the noise of Robert singing to himself in the front room. The boy had turned out to have a surprisingly good voice, although God only knew if it would last past breaking.

"What about you?" Will asked.

She wrapped her arms around her waist. "I never even sailed out of the Caribbean," she said. "Damn shame, that, should've taken you to Africa or Singapore."

"You should take Robert," he said, and a bird chirped in the undergrowth. Anamaria turned to him, dust motes drifting in the breeze created by her hair. Her eyes were hidden by shadow, but her hands flexed convulsively for a moment. "And then come back here," he added gently. "I'll be here. You can tell me stories of your adventures."

She huffed a laugh. "I never had adventures," she said, not quite bitterly. "Misadventures, mayhap."

* * *

They were gone before dawn Sunday; Will shook his head when he heard the door close behind them, and then he drank a cup of green-tasting water from the well and went to church.

All he could hear, for the first two months, was silence. Then Will began to attend to the creak of earth as it cooled after the day, the rattle of leaves in the wake of a sparrow's flight, the ephemeral hiss of an unfurling blossom. He refitted the bellows so they could be worked by foot, cleaned the windows until the scrub-water ran clear and shining, and bought bread twice a week.

When he hung the shutters, a man lingered in the shade of the honeysuckle vines nearby. Will made sure not to look at him, but when he knocked off for the day and sprawled out with a pitcher of water, his bootheels braced against the pale dust of the dooryard, he raised an empty mug toward where the man stood. The mild expression on his face had taken him years to cultivate.

They didn't speak, that day, drinking water in the dimming light until the man left, but three days later, he returned, leading a dappled grey mare. "Threw her left fore," he said, a pleasant Scottish burr thickening his vowels. Will nodded and bent to look at the hoof.

It wasn't much, but it was a start.

Somewhere along the line he had learned patience. He introduced himself, made allusion to the girl he had left behind him, went to church every week although he barely knew what he was praying for. He was content enough.

It was sufficient, he thought. He hoped, because if it was not, he did not know what else to do.

* * *

Robert got seasick, the first time they struck a storm, and it never fully went away.

* * *

Anamaria came back thin and tired. He made her an herb tisane, dug his thumbs into her shoulders until she gasped and slumped against the table, and didn't answer her drowsy demand of where he would sleep. Robert was a harder matter, but he settled himself against the curve of his mother's hip and watched Will as he leaned over to blow out the wick in the hurricane lamp.

"Thank you," he said. Will straightened and looked at him in surprise. "She's not very good at saying it."

Will shook his head. "You shouldn't be. Gratitude's a dangerous thing," he replied, and left, going down the stairs into the forge. It was utterly dark, and he found his way through the room to the west wall purely by memory. Once there, he picked up the water bucket he used to cool horseshoes and door-hinges and the like, relishing the weight in his hands, the scrape of the handle against his palms.

He sloshed water over his fingers and dabbed at his temples, inhaling the sharp viney scent of it, feeling the drops slide down his skin like tears. He couldn’t remember what it had felt like to cry, but he thought that maybe he could guess, because there was something wet and soft swelling in his chest. It would come out somewhere, burst out of him in a sudden flash of — he wasn't sure what, but it receded when he startled as the stairs creaked.

He couldn't see Robert, but he could hear his breathing. "Robert," he said, and swallowed. "I didn't say. Welcome home."

The air was warm, that night, full of the day's heat and Will's growing certainty, and the silence then was different from the absence that had filled the small house in the months that Will had occupied it. Will shivered nevertheless, a shudder racing beneath his skin.

"I didn't say," Robert said, his childish voice a thin thread of sound in the growing clamour of the world, birds and water and wind and girls laughing and axes striking wood, "Good night."

* * *

It had been a casual remark, Elizabeth had thought, a vague curiosity on Jack's part, wondering what sort of education she had received in her father's house—it was only sometimes that she realized how strange she was to him, too, what a foreign country inherited wealth was.

But when he woke her out of a sound sleep to hold the scrolls of the Chinese charts flat on the table in his cabin, she began to wonder what his object was. She watched him stretch thin strings of gut over the paper, triangulating their approach to shores she had only read about, her eyes sand-gritted with fatigue, and did not ask. Her knowledge of navigation was dry and ruled more by grammar than by reality; Jack looked up to stretch out his neck and said, "Can't see it on the map, but the shore runs fast and shallow 'long here, bad place to be swept into under full sail."

His ocean was a restless country with no boundaries, and she tried to pin it to the maps with the sextant and the weight of her mind. It became a familiar sight, her small hands chasing his across the minatures of the world that lay before them, tracking their wake with ink.

Lessons in the nursery they were not, but she did not regret the time Jack took from sleep and insisted she give to the maps and the instruments. She missed it, certainly, would have paid dearly to lie down and let her body slacken, but it was an abstract wish, one that had no connection to the life she had embraced, one she would never have spoken of to the man she did embrace.

* * *

Muscles swelled under Robert's skin, and he began to eat more, as Will prodded him into learning how to keep the bellows breathing longer, how to work past the first burn and slide of fatigue. It was only a dozen years since his own apprenticeship had begun, and the memory had not become frail with time.

He had not appreciated how patient Brown had been, he thought ruefully, biting back the thousandth scolding when Robert let the fire lapse. But then, his face had surely betrayed more of his feelings, his eagerness to please, his worry when he committed an error, than Robert's solemn blankness. He had tried, it was true, to conceal his unmanly anxiety, but he could not have been as successful as Robert, he could not have confronted his master with such a commonplace expression; it was impossible to credit.

Robert, though, had had a harder master than he had — there had always been Elizabeth, glimpses of her hair and bright eyes, and Captain Norrington's slight smile, for him. Will could not fathom the loneliness of Port Royal without some sort of fantasy, golden skin glimpsed across the town square and the glitter of the next sword. He did not pity the boy, pity was a dangerous thing, but he tried to be as kind as he knew how.

Anamaria could cook messes of blood-colored beans and rice paler than her skin in the small, dark kitchen and seemed to have an endless capacity for watching them together, but Will had known a woman before with the same distance under her skin and the growing burn in her eyes, and he opened the door one morning. She came up behind him, and he caught her wrist. "Time for you to go," he said. She tensed. "Robert can show you his work in six months."

She leaned her weight against him, trusting him, and her breath was warm on the skin of his neck. "Thank you," she said, and he did not trust himself to reply.

* * *

It did not astound the townspeople that he should have a boy with him in the forge. They only began to murmur when Robert sat, his chin on his knees, in the pew at church, or when Will gave into his shy request for raspberries when they were in season, lush and crimson. But that was not true, either, because they were grown used to the sight of them together before it ever was a surprise. The sidelong glances and whispers as they left shops were only from outsiders or those who prided themselves on saying the proper thing. Will didn't really care—they bought his work and didn't try to cheat him on the prices he set (which were more than fair, for the time and talent he brought to the task), and anything they told each other he could bear.

He did not think of what Robert might hear, until the day the boy came to him, a string of fish from Gerhalt's latest catch slung across his shoulders, and asked, "Why didn't I go with her?"

Will took the fish from him and began to strip the scales into the bucket by the table. "You're more use to me here," he said, knowing it might be brutal, but Robert was Anamaria's son, and if her blood had come true in him, it would be no less than he wanted. "Get your knife and help."

Robert's small fingers were good at prising tiny bones out of flesh, and for a few moments, there was only the soft sounds of Will's blade sliding across the horizon-silver skin of the fish and the fish skeletons coming apart in the bucket. Will stretched, and looked up. "The sea's no place to live," he said. "Not unless she loves you, and you aren't one of the fools she chose, Robert."

"But she is?"

It was always easy to tell when Robert spoke of Anamaria, or perhaps Will was the only one to hear it. He shrugged. He wasn't truly certain, but he could try to answer. Anamaria was both like and unlike Elizabeth—she longed for escape, yes, but Elizabeth had wanted to flee everything. Elizabeth was chasing the horizon, which receded the more she sailed toward it; Anamaria had been trying to reach somewhere, somewhere very far away. "I think," he said, "that your mother has forgotten that there's anywhere for her but the sea."

Robert nodded in understanding, and reached for the skillet. Will breathed out in relief, but when the fish lay in the pan, spitting fat, Robert said, "They think I'm a half-blood."

He had not heard that rumour, but it did not surprise him. He nodded. "I don't know," he said, and he didn't—he was full of ignorance tonight, he thought, vaguely amused and somewhere far back in his throat, ashamed.

But the surprise in Robert's face was more surprising than it should have been—the boy had begun to smile (not again, for the first time, perhaps), ask questions at odd times; his childhood breaking past the mask of obedience that had held him safe for so long. He could not fathom why his ignorance should shock him—this was not a question he could have put to Anamaria, any fool could see that. "I thought—" Robert said, softly, his gaze leaving Will's face to lay again on the pale fillet, "I thought you might be--"

Will gaped.

"Oh," he said, and his voice shook as it had not since he left the _Black Pearl_ over the rim of the world. "No."

Robert nodded, and he had gone somewhere behind his face. Will found himself reaching out, his hand clenching on air, and he drew in a breath. He and Robert were usually quiet together, speaking only when they needed to, but perhaps he should have said this long before. "I've never told you how your mother and I met, have I?" he said. Robert shook his head. "Well," Will began.

* * *

Elizabeth found herself buying trinkets in the markets. It was queer, because she had no need of them, and she had long since given up on appealing to Jack's taste, which could best be described as indiscriminate. She would spend her blood-bought money on things she didn't really want or need, and then pack them away in the crate next to her hammock as soon as she was back on board the _Pearl_.

It wasn't that she was ashamed of them—there was no reason she shouldn't buy pretty things, the heavens knew she had the gold for it, since the usual expense of whores in port towns wasn't to her taste, but still she felt obscurely embarrassed about it. It wasn't until Jack took note of the half-full box that she understood. "You'll fill that up in another three months," he'd said, and her cheeks had flamed hot for an instant. "If we don't get wrecked, we can be in Tortuga to track them down in four."

Something hot and sweet flooded her chest, and she couldn't speak. "_Jack_," she said a moment later, her voice suspiciously shaky, "Anything I ever said about your idiocy, I take it back."

"Who's been callin' me an idiot now?" Jack demanded. "I was never dropped on me head but once, and that was only—" and he went on murmuring nonsense into her hair as she buried her face into his coat, digging her fingers into the fabric. It had been months before she had learned that Jack would offer up his stories and obscene songs and sweet insults like honeybalm, and she let it soothe away the humiliating prickle in her eyes. When she drew a breath in and pulled away, he ran a thumb over her cheek, where a button had dug into her skin, leaving a mark. "You'll always love him," he said, solemnity peering out of his eyes, although his voice was light. "I wouldn't want you if you didn't."

She managed a smile and tipped her face up for his kiss. "Why, Jack Sparrow," she said, false, necessary brightness lacing her words, "who ever would believe you a romantic?"

"Practical," he said, straightening his hat. "Loyalty's a useful trait." And he swaggered out the door, leaving her with her feet propped on a half-empty crate of presents.

* * *

She kissed Robert goodbye when she left, every time, and then she began to brush her lips across Will's cheek, until the day he turned his head a little too fast and suddenly they were pressed against each other, hip to hip and mouth to mouth, and Robert was whistling loudly in the back garden. "Oh," Will said, and she smiled.

"Guess I could leave tomorrow," she said, soft and teasing against his mouth, and he was the one dragging her, this time, although she didn't resist, up the stairs to his room, which smelled of grass and bread and soap, and dear God in heaven, it was amazing, the heat in her skin, the smooth scars, the way she trembled when he curled his finger like that.

* * *

Jack and Elizabeth came in Christmas morning, laden with sunburn and rum and gaudy jewelry, and they fell silent when they saw Robert. Anamaria glared, and handed them glasses, and slowly the ice in the air thawed.

They came back for Christmas, most years, and when they didn't—because they didn't always—Will tried not to worry, and Anamaria would kiss his shoulder and suggest that they take the skiff out to the cove to the south and watch the dolphins chase the horizon.

He'd smile, turn to her, say, "We'll take fishing poles. I'll dig a firepit. We can stay there for a few days."

And it was all right, it really was, because what's better than fish caught and gutted and cooked, all within a half-hour? Ah. Yes. That was better, the salt flavor of Anamaria's skin, and the soft sounds she made when he caught her earlobe between his teeth, and the way her fingers gripped him, tight and then looser, when she gasped. They watched the stars, when they were done, and the sand stuck to their skin, but they didn't care, because there was a whole ocean they could wash in.

Eventually they would go back to the forge, and the rooms above it. The apartments attached to the shop were always warm from the heat of the fire below — uncomfortably warm, and Will had long since shed unnecessary modesty like a boy's shirt that hadn't fit in years.

He would strip coming up the stairs, but there was no one to be shocked — Robert avoided the upstairs, preferring the cool dirt floor and sweet-smelling mattress of his own room, which they had built one summer, sacrificing lines of lettuce in the garden for it, and the only people who came up stairs besides Will and Anamaria were Jack and Elizabeth, and really, what Jack and Elizabeth didn't know about Will and Anamaria after all this time even Will and Anamaria didn't know.

Anamaria took the sloop out twice a week, smuggling rum and tea and whatever people want now, because that was what she did—although she was amused by what she found in her hold these days; she and Will didn't need any of it, and they're quite happy, thank you kindly, and Will made horseshoes and balcony railings and repaired cannon and occasionally, for old times's sake, he would make a sword, and the balance was always perfect. His swords have always been alive, they've always sung, but they don't shriek. Not anymore. They didn't demand _more more more_ now—because Will didn't want what he couldn't have now. He had Anamaria's fingers in his mouth, and the sweet scent of smoke, and his shirt had been mended too many times to count, from where they always ripped it, getting it off him, yes, now, right now, oh god, Will, and he even felt sorry for Elizabeth, because no matter how many baubles, from Singapore and Siam and places that didn't have names, she brought him, she'd never be happy in quite this way.

  
  



End file.
